The Wise Man's Fear

CHAPTER NINETY-SIX The Fire Itself

I woke with something brushing at the edges of my memory. I opened my eyes and saw trees stretched against a twilight sky. There were silken pillows all around me, while a few feet away Felurian lay, her naked body loosely splayed in sleep.

She looked smooth and perfect as a sculpture. She sighed in her sleep, and I chided myself for the thought. I knew she was nothing like cold stone. She was warm and supple, the smoothest marble grindstone by comparison.

My hand reached out to touch her, but I stopped myself, not wanting to disturb the perfect scene before me. A distant thought began to nag at me, but I brushed it away like an irritating fly.

Felurian’s lips parted and sighed, making a sound like a dove. I remembered the touch of those lips. I ached, and forced myself to look away from her soft, flower-petal mouth.

Her closed eyelids were patterned like a butterfly’s wings, swept in whorls of deep purple and black with traceries of pale gold that blended to the color of her skin. As her eyes moved gently in sleep, the pattern shifted, as if the butterfly fanned its wings. That sight alone was probably worth the price all men must pay for seeing it.

I ate her with my eyes, knowing all the songs and stories I had heard were nothing. She is what men dream of. All the places I have been, all the women I have seen, I have met her equal only once.

Something in my mind screamed at me, but I was bemused by the motion of her eyes beneath her lids, the shape her mouth made, as if she would kiss me even while she slept. I swatted the thought away again, irritated.

I was going to go mad, or die.

The idea finally fought its way through to my conscious mind, and I felt every hair on my body stand suddenly on end. I had a moment of perfect, clear lucidity that resembled coming up for air and quickly closed my eyes, trying to lower myself into the Heart of Stone.

It didn’t come. For the first time in my life, that cool taciturn state escaped me. Behind my eyes, Felurian distracted me. The sweet breath. The soft breast. The urgent half-despairing sighs that slipped through hungry, petal-tender lips. . . .

Stone. I kept my eyes closed and wrapped the calm rationality of Heart of Stone around me like a mantle before I dared even think of her again.

What did I know? I brought to mind a hundred stories of Felurian and plucked out the recurring themes. Felurian was beautiful. She charmed mortal men. They followed her into the Fae and died in her embrace.

How did they die? It was fairly simple to guess: extreme physical stress. Things had been rather rigorous, and the sedentary or frail might not have fared so well as I. Now that I stopped to notice, my entire body felt like a well-wrung rag. My shoulders ached, my knees burned, and my neck bore the sweet bruising of love bites from my right ear, down my chest, and. . . .

My body flushed and I struggled deeper into the Heart of Stone until my pulse slowed and I could force the thought of her from the front of my mind.

I could remember four stories where men had come back from the Fae alive, all of them cracked as the potter’s cobbles. What manner of madness did they exhibit? Obsessive behavior, accidental death due to separation from reality, and wasting away from extreme melancholy. Three died within a span of days. The fourth story told of the man lasting nearly half a year.

But something didn’t make sense. Admittedly, Felurian was lovely. Skilled? Without a doubt. But to the extent that every man died or went insane? No. It simply wasn’t likely.

I don’t mean to belittle the experience. I don’t doubt for a second that it had, quite naturally, deprived men of their faculties in the past. I, however, knew myself to be quite sane.

I briefly entertained the notion that I was insane and didn’t know it. Then I considered the possibility that I had always been insane, acknowledged it as more likely than the former, then pushed both thoughts from my mind.

Eyes still closed, I lay there, enjoying a quiet languor of a sort I’d never felt before. I savored the moment, then opened my eyes and prepared to make my escape.

I looked around the pavilion at silken draperies and scattered cushions. These were only ornaments for Felurian. She lay in the middle of it all, all rounded hip and slender leg and lithe muscle shifting underneath her skin.

She was watching me.

If she was beautiful at rest she was doubly so awake. Asleep she was a painting of a fire. Awake she was the fire itself.

It may seem strange to you that at this point I felt fear. It may seem strange that only an arm’s length from the most attractive woman in the world, I was suddenly reminded of my own mortality.

She smiled like a knife in velvet and stretched like a cat in the sun.

Her body was built to stretch, the arch of her back, the smooth expanse of her belly going taut. The round fullness of her breasts was lifted by the motion of her arms, and suddenly I felt like a stag in rut. My body reacted to her, and I felt as if someone were hammering at the cool impassivity of Heart of Stone with a hot poker. My control slipped for a moment, and a less disciplined piece of my mind started composing a song to her.

I couldn’t spare the attention to rein that piece of myself back in. So I focused on staying safe in the Heart of Stone, ignoring both her body and that nattering part of my mind forming rhyming couplets somewhere in the back of my head.

It wasn’t the easiest thing to do. As a matter of fact, it made the ordinary rigors of sympathy seem simple as skipping. If not for the training I’d received at the University, I would have been a broken, pitiful thing, only able to concentrate on my own captivation.

Felurian slowly relaxed out of her stretch and looked at me with ancient eyes. Eyes unlike anything I had ever seen. They were a striking color . . .

The summer dusk was in her eyes

. . . a sort of twilight blue. They were fascinating. In fact . . .

With lids of winged butterflies

. . . there wasn’t any white to them at all. . . .

Her lips the shade of sunset skies

I clenched my jaw, split that chattering piece of myself away, and walled it off in a distant corner of my mind, letting it sing to itself.

Felurian tilted her head to one side. Her eyes were as intent and expressionless as a bird’s. “why are you so quiet, flame lover? have I quenched you?”

Her voice was odd to my ear. It had no rough edges to it at all. It was all quiet smoothness, like a piece of perfectly polished glass. Despite its odd softness, Felurian’s voice ran down my spine, making me feel like a cat that’s just been stroked down to the tip of its tail.

I retreated further into the Heart of Stone, felt it cool and reassuring around me. However, while the majority of my attention was focused on self-control, the small, mad, lyric part of my mind leapt to the fore and said: “Never quenched. Though I am doused in you, I burn. The motion of your turning head is like a song. Is like a spark. Is like a breath that billows me and fans to flame a fire that cannot help but spread and roar your name.”

Felurian’s face lit up. “a poet! I should have known you for a poet by how your body moved.”

The gentle hush of her voice caught me unprepared again. It wasn’t that her words were breathy, or husky, or sultry. It was nothing so tawdry or affected as that. But when she spoke, I couldn’t help but be aware of the fact that her breath was pressed from her breast, past the soft sweetness of her throat, then shaped by the careful play of lips and teeth and tongue.

She came closer, moving on her hands and knees through the pillows. “you looked like a poet, fiery and fair.” Her voice was no louder than a breath as she cupped my face with her hands. “poets are gentler. they say nice things.”

There was only one person I’d ever heard whose voice was similar to this. Elodin. On rare occasions his voice would fill the air as if the world itself were listening.

Felurian’s voice was not resonant. It did not fill the forest glade. Hers was the hush before a sudden summer storm. It was soft as a brushing feather. It made my heart step sideways in my chest.

Speaking thus, when she called me a poet, it did not raise my hackles or make me grit my teeth. From her, it sounded like the sweetest thing a man was ever called. Such was the power of her voice.

Felurian brushed her fingertips across my lips. “poet kisses are best. you kiss me like a candle flame.” She brought one of her hands back to touch her mouth, her eyes bright at the memory.

I took her hand and pressed it tenderly. My hands have always seemed graceful, but next to hers, they looked brutish and crude. I breathed against her palm as I spoke. “Your kisses are like sunlight on my lips.”

She lowered her eyes, butterfly wings dancing. I felt my mindless need for her slacken and began to understand. This was magic, but nothing like what I knew. Not sympathy or sygaldry. Felurian made men mad with desire the same way I gave off body heat. It was natural for her, but she could control it.

Her gaze wandered over my tangle of clothes and belongings strewn messily at one corner of the glade. They looked oddly out of place amid the silks and soft colors. I saw her eyes settle on my lute case. She froze.

“is my flame a sweet poet? does he sing?” Her voice trembled and I could feel a tenseness in her body as she waited for an answer. She looked back at me. I smiled.

Felurian scampered off and brought back my lute case like a child with a new toy. As I took it, I saw her eyes were wide and . . . wet?

I looked into her eyes, and in a flash of understanding I realized what her life must be like. A thousand years old, and lonely from time to time. If she wanted companionship she had to seduce and lure. And for what? An evening of company? An hour? How long could an average man last before his will broke and he became as mindless as a fawning dog? Not long.

And who would she meet in the forest? Farmers and hunters? What entertainment could they provide, slaved to her passions? I felt a moment of pity for her. I know what loneliness is like.

I took the lute from its case and began to tune it. I struck an experimental chord and carefully tuned it again. What to play for the most beautiful woman in the world?

It wasn’t hard to decide, actually. My father had taught me to judge an audience. I struck up “Sisters Flin.” If you’ve never heard of it, I’m not surprised. It’s a bright and lively song about two sisters gossiping while they argue over the price of butter.

Most people want to hear stories of legendary adventure and romance. But what do you play for someone out of legend? What do you sing for a woman who has been the object of romance for a mortal age? You play her songs of ordinary people. So I hoped.

She clapped delightedly at the end of it. “more! more?” She smiled hopefully, cocking her head to make it a request. Her eyes were wide and eager and adoring.

I played her “Larm and His Alepot.” I played her “Blacksmith’s Daughters.” I played her a ridiculous song about a priest chasing a cow that I’d written when I was ten and never even named.

Felurian laughed and applauded. She covered her mouth in shock and her eyes in embarrassment. The more I played, the more she reminded me of a young country wife attending her first fair, full of pure joy, face shining with innocent delight, eyes wide in amazement at everything she sees.

And lovely, of course. I concentrated on my fingering so as not to think about it.

After each song she rewarded me with a kiss that made it difficult to decide what to play next. Not that I minded horribly. I’d come to realize rather quickly that I preferred kisses to coins.

I played her “Tinker Tanner.” Let me tell you, the image of Felurian, her quiet, fluting voice singing the chorus of my favorite drinking song is something that will never, never leave me. Not until I die.

All the while I felt the charm she had on me slacken, bit by bit. It gave me room to breathe. I relaxed and let myself slide a little farther out of the Heart of Stone. Dispassionate calm can be a useful frame of mind, but it does not make for a compelling performance.

I played for hours, and by the end of it I felt like myself again. By which I mean I could look at Felurian with no more reaction than you might normally feel, looking at the most beautiful woman in the world.

I can still remember her, sitting naked among the cushions, twilight-colored butterflies dancing in the air between us. I wouldn’t have been alive had I not been aroused. But my mind seemed to be my own again, and I was grateful for that.

She made a disappointed noise of protest as I set the lute back into its case. “are you weary?” she asked with a hint of a smile. “I would not have tired you, sweet poet, had I known.”

I gave my best apologetic smile. “I’m sorry, but it seems to be getting late.” Actually, the sky still showed the same purple hint of twilight it had since I first woke, but I pushed on. “I’ll need to be moving quickly if I’m to meet . . .”

My mind went numb as quickly as if I’d been struck a blow to the back of my head. I felt the passion, fierce and insatiable. I felt the need to have her, to crush her body to mine, to taste the savage sweetness of her mouth.

Only because of my arcane training did I hold onto any concept of my own identity at all. Even so, I only held it with my barest fingertips.

Felurian sat cross-legged on the cushions across from me, her face angry and terrible, her eyes cold and hard as distant stars. With a deliberate calm she brushed a slowly fanning butterfly from her shoulder. There was such a weight of fury in her simple gesture that my stomach clenched and I realized this fact:

No one ever left Felurian. Ever. She kept men until their bodies and minds broke beneath the strain of loving her. She kept them until she tired of them, and when she sent them away it was the leaving that drove men mad.

I was powerless. I was a novelty. I was a toy, favorite because it was newest. It might be a long while before she tired of me, but the time would come. And when she finally set me free my mind would tear itself apart with wanting her.